The Search API is a great tool to find interesting PLOS articles, and the ALM API can then collect metrics about these articles. Using the R statistical programming language is one of the easiest ways to look at these metrics. Below are a few example visualizations, the source code to all of them can be found in the plosOpenR Github repository.

We are excited to announce the upcoming release of version 2.0 of the PLoS Article Level Metrics application on July 31. Version 2.0 includes many changes under the hood, and now uses Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3.2. The biggest improvements are in how the application processes requests to external services in the background. As with the ALM 1.x application, we will make the source code available at https://github.com/articlemetrics/alm.